The Heart of a Woman Part 33

"Yes. With 'is 'ands in 'is pockets, and the tip pointing upward, like a soldier's bayonet."

"You saw that and not his face?" once more insisted the coroner, making a final effort to draw some more definite statement out of the man. It would help justice so much if only this witness were less obstinate! No one would believe that he really saw nothing of the face of the man who had twice spoken to him. He may not have seen it clearly, not the upper part of the face perhaps, but surely he saw the mouth that had actually framed the words!

But the chauffeur was obstinate. He was not going to swear away the life of a man whom he had not rightly seen, only through a fog as thick as pea soup: this was the fortress behind which after awhile he entrenched himself.

In vain did the coroner, pleased at having gained this slight advantage, try to draw him further, explaining to him with the quiet patience of a man moved by official ambition that, far from jeopardizing the life of any man, he might be saving that of an innocent one, falsely accused through circ.u.mstantial evidence. In vain did he press and argue, the man was obstinate. After a very long while only, and when the coroner had almost given up arguing and cross-examining, he admitted that he did think that the gentleman who directed him to No. 1 Cromwell Road had a moustache.

"But, mind," he added hurriedly, "I won't swear to it, for I didn't rightly see--the fog was that dense in the park. And 'e wasn't the same as the one 'oo told me to go along Piccadilly until 'e stopped me. The dead man done that."

"How do you know," came as a quick retort from the coroner, "since you declare you could not see the faces?"

"The first gent 'oo spoke to me," replied the chauffeur somewhat sullenly now, "'ad no 'air on 'is face; the second one I think 'ad--but I can't rightly say. I wouldn't swear to neither. And I won't swear," he reiterated with gruff emphasis.

A sigh went round the room, a tremor of excitement, the palpitation of many hearts, and in-drawing of many breaths. No one spoke. No one framed the thought that was uppermost in the mind of every one of the interested spectators of this strange and un-understandable drama. The dead man who lay in the mortuary chamber was clean-shaved, but Luke de Mountford wore a moustache.

Lady Ducies' feathers nodded in the direction of the literary countess who went by the name of Maria Annunziata and the latter made hasty notes in her diminutive book.

But Louisa leaned slightly forward so as to catch fuller sight of Luke, and she encountered his eyes fixed steadily upon her.

After that the driver of the cab concluded his evidence more rapidly.

There was little more there than what every one had already learned from the newspapers. The second pulling up in Cromwell Road this time: the silent fare, the descent from the box, the discovery of the huddled figure in the far corner of the cab, the call for the police.

People listened with less attention; thoughts were busy with the contemplation of a picture: two men, one clean-shaved--the dead man of course--and the other wearing a moustache. The first link in the chain of evidence against the a.s.sa.s.sin had been forged and was ready to be rivetted to the next.

The crowd in the body of the court could only obtain a view of the top of Luke de Mountford's head. It was smooth and fair, of that English fairness of tint which is golden when the light catches it.

And the group of elegantly dressed women who came here to-day in order to experience an altogether novel sensation shuddered with delightful excitement as they thought of Black Maria, and handcuffs, and crowds of police officers in blue. A jumble of impressions ran riot in frivolous and irresponsible minds, foremost amongst which was one that the public was not longer allowed to witness a final scene on the gallows.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE NEXT WITNESS PLEASE

The air grew more and more heavy as the morning dragged on. It was now close on twelve o'clock.

Frederick Power, hall porter of the Veterans' Club had finished his evidence. With the precision of a soldier he had replied curtly and to the point to every question put to him, and had retold all that had occurred on that foggy night, in the smoking room and the lobby of the Veterans' Club in Shaftesbury Avenue.

It was but a repet.i.tion of what he had told Sir Thomas Ryder in Colonel Harris's presence the day before. Louisa had had it all at full length from her father; she had drawn the whole story out of him, point by point, just as the man had told it originally. Colonel Harris, reluctant to tell her, was gradually driven to concealing nothing from her. Moreover, since she had made up her mind to attend the inquest she might as well hear it all from him first, the better to be prepared for the public ordeal.

Though she knew it all, she listened attentively to every word which Frederick Power uttered, lest her father had--in telling her--omitted some important detail. She heard again at full length the account of Luke's visit to the Veterans' Club, his desire to see Philip de Mountford, the interview in the smoking room behind closed doors, the angry words of obvious, violent quarrelling.

Then Luke's return to the lobby, his departure, the final taunt spoken by Philip and the look of murder in his eye, sworn to by the hall porter. She listened to it all, and heard without flinching the last question which the coroner put to the witness:

"Did Mr. de Mountford's visitor carry a stick when he left the club?"

"'E 'ad a stick, sir, when 'e came," was the porter's reply, "and I 'anded it to 'im myself when 'e left."

Louisa had been sitting all this while at the extreme end of the row of chairs, right up against the wall. She sat with her back to the wall, her head leaning against it, her hands hidden within the folds of a monumental sable m.u.f.f lying idly in her lap. She had her father on her right, and beyond him Mr. Dobson and his clerk; she saw them all in profile as they looked straight before them, at the coroner and at each succeeding witness.

Luke sat farther on, and, as he was slightly turned toward her, she could watch his face all the while that she listened to the hall porter's evidence. It was perfectly still, the features as if moulded in wax; the eyes which actually were a clear hazel appeared quite dark and almost as if they had sunk back within their circling lids. He sat with arms folded, and not a muscle in face or body moved. No stone-carved image could have been more calm, none could have been so mysterious.

Louisa tried to understand and could not. She watched him, not caring whether the empty-headed fools who sat all round saw her watching him or not.

When the coroner asked the hall porter about the stick and the man gave his reply, Luke turned and met Louisa's fixed gaze. The marble-like stillness of his face remained unchanged, only the eyes seemed as if they darkened visibly. At least to her it seemed as if a velvety shadow crept over them, an inscrutable, an un-understandable shadow, and the rims a.s.sumed a purple hue.

It was her fancy of course. But Luke's eyes were naturally bright, of varying tones of gray, blue, or green, with never a shadow beneath them. Now they appeared cavernous and dark, and again as he met her gaze, that swift flash of intense misery.

No longer had she the feeling that she was living in a dream, no longer that this was a theatre wherein she and Luke and the dead man were puppets dancing and squirming for the benefit of shallow-hearted dolts. That sense of unreality left her together with the hysterical desire to laugh which had plagued her so in the earlier part of the proceedings. On the contrary, now an overwhelming feeling of intense reality oppressed her, so that she could have screamed with the awful soul agony which the sight of Luke's misery had caused her.

All her nerves were on the rack, her every faculty concentrated on the one supreme desire to understand and to know.

Love, the omnipotent, had encountered an enemy--grim, unexplained Mystery--and he sat pondering, almost cowed by this first check to his supreme might. Louisa had sought and compelled Luke's gaze, and Love had gleamed in one great flash out of her eyes. Yesterday, at her glance, he had knelt at her feet and buried his sorrow with his aching head in the scented palm of the dearly loved hand.

To-day the look of Love brought but a surfeit of misery, an additional load of sorrow. The eyes in response remained tearless and hard and circled with the dark rings of utter hopelessness.

I'll grant you that if Louisa Harris had been an extraordinary woman, a woman endowed with a wonderfully complex, wonderfully pa.s.sionate, or wonderfully emotional nature--if, in fact, she had been the true product of this century's morbid modernity--she would, whilst admitting Luke's guilt, have burned with a pa.s.sion of self-sacrifice, pining to stand beside him pilloried in the dock, and looking forward to a veritable world of idealistic realism in the form of a picturesque suicide, after seeing the black flag hoisted over Newgate prison.

But Louisa, though a modern product of an ultra-modern world, was an absolutely ordinary woman--just a commonplace, sensible creature who thought and felt in a straight and essentially wholesome manner.

Though she had read Tolstoi and Dostoyefsky and every Scandinavian and Russian crack-brain who has ever tried to make wrong seem right, black appear white, and animalism masquerade as love, yet she had never been led away from her own clean outlook on life.

She loved Luke and would have given--did in fact give--her whole life to him: but she loved him without a.n.a.lysis or thought of self. It never entered her mind at this moment to wonder if he were guilty or not guilty, if he was capable or not of committing a crime to gain his own ends. All that troubled her was his misery, which she would have given her very soul to alleviate, and the hopelessness in him which she had given the world to console.

The mystery troubled her, not the sin: the marble-like rigidity of his face, not the possibility of the crime.

For the moment, however, she was brought back quickly enough to present realities. The coroner--satisfied with Frederick Power's answers--was giving him a moment's breathing s.p.a.ce. The grating of fountain pens against paper was heard from that corner of the room where sat the journalists: the crowd waited silent and expectant, for--unversed though most people there present were in proceedings of this kind--yet instinctively every one felt that one great crucial moment was just about to come; one great, leading question was just about to be put.

The coroner had fingered the papers before him for the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds, then he looked up once more at the witness, his elbow resting on the table, his fleshy chin buried in his hand, in an att.i.tude which obviously was habitual to him.

"This visitor," he said speaking loudly and clearly, "who called the night before last at the Veterans' Club and had an interview with the deceased, you saw him well, of course?"

"Yes, sir," was the prompt reply.

"You would know him again?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Looking round this room now, should you say that he was present?"

The man looked across the room straight at Luke and said pointing to him:

"Yes, sir; the gentleman sitting there, sir."

As every one had expected the reply, no one seemed astonished. The many pairs of eyes that turned on Luke now expressed a certain measure of horrified compa.s.sion, such as might be bestowed on some dangerous animal brought to earth by a well-aimed gun shot.

The coroner made no comment. He turned to the jury, glancing along either row of solemn faces, on both sides of the long table. Then he said:

"Would any of you gentlemen like to ask this witness a question?"